First Year Core Studios

Your first year at CCA introduces you to hands-on making and conceptual thinking. The specialized studios are your home base for exploring ideas across drawing, sculpture, and time-based media.

📍184 Hooper St.

Media Gallery

Students line a First Year hallway working on graphite drawings.
A group of students transform jumpsuits through color, collage, and painting.
A class reviews table-top cardboard sculptures.
A group of students work on watercolor paintings around a table.
An overhead view of two students working on their Protest Prosthetics project in a white presentation space.
Three students dressed in black walk toward the end of a light-filled hallway.
Two students present their colorful, wearable jumpsuits.
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🌎 Your chance to explore

Our Core Studio courses help you build skills common to most architecture, design, and fine arts practices. You’re trying out how concepts, dimensions, and making differ across our 22 programs—and finding your dream major in the process.

Architecture Division

Reimagine cities and environments in our two undergraduate Architecture majors: a five-year, Bachelor of Architecture (BArch) program—which is NAAB-accredited and STEM-designated—and a four-year accredited BFA in Interior Design program.

Design Division

Our six undergraduate Design programs train students in conceptual exploration, which includes the ability to research materials and examine ideas through the lenses of history and present-day society and culture. Your options include bachelor’s degrees in Fashion Design, Furniture, Graphic Design, Illustration, Industrial Design, and Interaction Design.

Fine Arts Division

We offer 12 BFA programs, including the self-directed Individualized Studies degree for students whose work intersects multiple fields. Head to the Fine Arts Division tour stop to learn more about Animation, Ceramics, Film, Game Arts, Individualized Studies, Jewelry and Metal Arts, Painting and Drawing, Photography, Printmedia, Sculpture, and Textiles.

Humanities & Sciences Division

CCA’s three undergraduate humanities and social sciences degree programs introduce students to a spectrum of methods and people with many different passions. Find your voice and share your story in our History of Art and Visual Culture, Writing and Literature, and Comics programs.

🏠 The foundation of your CCA experience

Your first year is all about discovery, and you’ll be immersed in studio life, interdisciplinarity, and critique culture. Not only will you learn *how* to make things, but how to think through the *why* of making things. No matter your medium, connecting ideas to craft is key to sharing your story with yourself, your community, and the world.

🛠 Where you’ll create

Our first-year making spaces are built for exploring materials, tools, and dimensions together with your cohort. Course projects make full use of these facilities, whether you’re making cardboard wearables in the 3D Studio or large-scale perspective drawings in 2D Studios.

Brand-new shops and studios

The ground floor of 184 Hooper includes new first-year facilities like a bench room, woodshop, and state-of-the-art computer lab. You’ll learn how to use a drill for the first time, create plaster molds, form wire into sculptures, paint with ink, and so much more. The building has direct access to Founders Hall, meaning your dorm is as close as can be to your studio.

📕 What you’ll learn

First Year Core Curriculum focuses on experimentation, visual communication, skill-learning, critical analysis, and of course, craft. Faculty are here for you every step of the way, offering 1:1 guidance as you find your path as an artist. Failure is embraced in the program as an opportunity to learn and move forward alongside your peers.

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